The Christie aides brought down by Bridgegate

The bombshell traffic scandal that broke open in New Jersey this week brought down a trio of top advisers to Gov. Chris Christie: a high school mate whose passion for politics bordered on obsessive; a onetime campaign staffer for John McCain and Rudy Giuliani; and an ex-statehouse staffer who once headed her small town’s Republican club.

Here’s a look at the Christie allies at the center of the drama unfolding in the Garden State and reverberating across the country.

Wildstein, now 52, is a former town council member, mayor, political operative, anonymous political writer and founder of the respected site PolitickerNJ.com. He and Christie both attended Livingston High School, though Wildstein was a year ahead of Christie and the extent of their relationship then is unclear.

By 2010, Wildstein was brought on by a Christie appointee to serve as director of interstate capital projects for Port Authority, though Christie stressed in a press conference Thursday that the two rarely spoke during Wildstein’s tenure there.

But his time in New Jersey politics far predates the Port Authority post. Wildstein has long been considered a political animal and some have described him as ruthless: Reports last month indicated that he bought the domain names of more than 50 people, including many New Jersey Democrats.

“I love this [political] stuff,” said one individual who worked closely with Wildstein, “He was psychotic about it, I could beat most people in political trivia; I couldn’t last with him for two minutes.”

At 23, Wildstein was elected to town council in Livingston, N.J., for a four-year term. During that period, he went on to become the city’s mayor, according to a lengthy 2012 profile in The Record (N.J.), which this week broke the bridge story.

“It was a tumultuous time,” Wildstein’s council running mate, Thomas L. Adams, told the paper. “He was just a kid, a very ambitious kid.”

Wildstein, who at age 12 volunteered for then-congressional candidate Tom Kean Sr., went on to work for several New Jersey politicians, including Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) and the late Rep. Bob Franks (R-N.J.), the latter of whom he served as an adviser, the report noted.

He launched PolitickerNJ.com — then called PoliticsNJ.com — in 2000 under the pen name “Wally Edge,” named for a former New Jersey GOP governor and senator. Wildstein, burly and bespectacled, was known for getting insider information from politicos on both sides of the aisle.

“He was not a Christie-o-phile back then,” said the source who has worked closely with Wildstein, who is married with children.

“Wally Edge” was known for driving the New Jersey political conversation with frequent, sometimes flippant, posts.